Richard Saltoun Gallery has announced the representation of British multidisciplinary artist Florence Peake (b. 1973), ahead of her solo exhibition Enactment at the London gallery from 28th March – 20th May, and her first institutional solo in London, FACTUAL ACTUAL : Ensemble, on view at Southwark Park Galleries, London, from 15th April – 2nd July, and touring to Towner, Eastbourne and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh later in 2023/24.
Peake produces paintings, sculptures, films, and immersive performances rooted in materiality and physicality. She brings together dancers, performers, and communities to create choreographies that encourage a seemingly chaotic relationship between the bodies and the material. The artist’s sculptures and paintings are a result of this interaction and capture the profusion of experiences and feelings recorded within our bodies.
About the artist
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995.
Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body’s physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas.
Peake’s work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake’s painting is as an extension of the body itself: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Their painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.
Peake has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens, Catherine Hoffmann, Eve Stainton, Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes. Peake is part of the Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Peake’s work has been presented at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020),Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012). florencepeake.com
